With no end in sight, county’s solid waste crisis is garbage

When Miami-Dade last month rejected a garbage fee increase, commissioners knew what service cuts would follow. They will now learn two more things: how 355,000 families will tolerate less service, and whether operators will try to close funding gaps.

County solid waste fees cover garbage and litter pickup; only those with county rather than city service pay. In theory, the fees fund all the work – except that commissioners historically haven’t charged enough to cover all costs. Next year will be no exception.

Yearly fees sat at $439 from 2006 to 2017, with commissioners refusing to raise them along with costs. The fee went to $464 in 2018, then $484 for 2019 and 2020, until the commission bit the bullet and raised fees $150 in a single year to $697 for 2024 to catch up. They edged up to $702 in 2025. This year the mayor asked for $716 – but commissioners rejected any raise at all.

There comes a time when a farmer can’t feed the horse less and expect it to keep pulling the same heavy plow. Eventually, the load gets too heavy. So for the last two years, the commission has ordered Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to seek a 2% fee hike, which would almost cover inflation.

Despite their own 2% order, last year commissioners agreed to only 0.7%, and this year no hike at all.
The mayor told commissioners exactly what would be cut without the 2%. No raise will mean half as much work on illegal dumping and homeless encampments, half as much litter pickup, a 22% cut in code enforcement, a 10% cut in responding to billing questions, and deferral of all new pothole repairs and street resurfacing near solid waste sites.

So officials know exactly what’s going. What they don’t know is what outcry might follow.
The outcry may go beyond the public. In the spring, commissioners heard a long complaint from Chairman Anthony Rodriguez about poor roadside litter pickup. He said he drives around photographing litter and records how well county workers respond to his complaints. Now he’s on track to get only half as much effort. The appetite for service cuts may be short-lived.

Those may not be the only cuts. In June, the mayor said that “without future rate support, these impacts will deepen and may require more service-delivery modifications, including hours at trash and recycling centers and moving to once-per-week garbage collections for residents and businesses.”

Despite the frightening list of what-ifs – ex-commissioner Javier Souto used to call it the “parade of the horribles” – few at the July meeting that kept rates flat said yes when Mr. Rodriguez took a straw vote on whether to reconsider an increase they had rejected hours earlier.

Raquel Regalado did the same thing she’d done in rate-setting a year earlier: she asked the solid waste department to think entrepreneurially.

“I continue to say that there are revenue opportunities within this department,” she said last year. “My issue with this particular department is that it has the opportunity to generate revenue and instead it chooses to place the entire burden on the back of the taxpayer.”

“This department has to stop thinking about we pay someone to take the trash and then they make money from that trash,” she added. “That is not OK. We have to have a piece of the revenue that other people make from the trash that we give them.”

This year she pointed at mini-dumps for revenue. Last year she touted a landfill methane gas concession – which the county now is working on – and buyers for cardboard waste. How realistic are those sources? The only way to know is to literally dig into getting money from our trash.

That’s why when commissioners talked of reconsidering hiking the solid waste fee, Ms. Regalado dug in her heels. “I would tell you to hold it,” she said. “This is choices we’re making to do things in a certain way and … we could do better. We’re just not being pushed to do better.”

Solid waste is a mess. The county still has no plan for processing garbage three-and-a-half years after its old plant burned, though the mayor told commissioners in May that the county had so far spent $13.1 million on design, engineering and site selection analyses.

“The county cannot responsibly continue spending ratepayer dollars and staff resources to plan a [waste-to-energy facility] while rejecting the rate increases necessary to fund the system it would depend upon,” she said then.

Commissioners have now formally refused to raise rates and they’ve never been willing to pick a site to dispose of garbage or even decide how to do it. The solid waste folks won’t consider ways to raise revenue internally. The mayor’s solution is for none of us to generate garbage, a really nice thought that in our society might have impact in decades – or not at all.

Which is to say, nobody is making a real difference. Talk about garbage.